Piles of white plastic sacks line both sides of a small gravel lot in Sitka’s Gary Paxton Industrial Park. There’s around 90 of these bags, each about the size of a washing machine, stuffed with marine debris.
“I’m not sure what these buoys are for,” says Zofia Danielson as she picks up a bundle of oblong buoys resting near one pile’s base. Their red plastic has faded into a translucent orange from salt and the sun. “In the last two years, Sitkans have been finding them all across the sound.”
Danielson is the Sitka Sound Science Center’s managing scientist. She oversees the marine debris program that’s been gathering scraps along the coastline for the past year and a half. This summer, the team made a puzzling discovery at Inner Point on Kruzof Island.
“I imagine somebody scribbled it out and dropped it in the ocean as a reflection of how they were feeling at the time,” she says.
An ambiguous seven-line poem sprawls across a small piece of lined paper. It’s rolled up inside a glass bottle dotted with algae and sealed with a plastic cork.
“We all love to wax poetic about the ocean, about her many currents and storms, and I think truly the perfect storm brought the message in a bottle to Inner Point.”
Danielson says the crew isn’t sure where it came from or how long ago it was written. She says finding a message in a bottle is actually pretty common. But this one is a bit more cryptic than others they’ve stumbled upon in the past.
“Sometimes they have more of a story,” she says, “and sometimes they’re a little more of a mystery.”
And she’s leaving the contents of the poem a mystery too.
“It’s a message for the person and the sea,” Danielson says.
They found the bottle nestled in a stack of driftwood logs.
“It’s always a lucky find when you find something fragile in such a rugged landscape.”
Danielson says the wind, waves, and currents along the outer coast are the perfect recipe for marine debris to accumulate on the shore. They plan to go out on a total of 35 cleanup days this summer. When they do, a crew of four travels an hour or two from Sitka on a small vessel, then rows into shore on a dinghy.
“They crawl through the jungle gym of alder trees up in the high intertidal and wade through the dense beachgrass and cow parsnip to pick up plastic bottles and other smaller pieces of debris that can be hidden by the summer’s vegetation,” she says.
After several hours on shore, the team passes the debris in an assembly line onto the dinghy to take back to the boat. Once in Sitka, the collection is driven out to the lot at the industrial park to be weighed and documented.
The science center has a statewide database for marine debris cleanup efforts dating back to the early 2000s.
“Marine debris is an incredibly powerful tool for communication,” Danielson says.
With their findings, they can learn more about where debris washes up, how much accumulates over time, and the impact it has on intertidal plants and animals. Whether it’s a message in a bottle or a fishing net, Danielson says every piece of debris has a story to tell.
